The five reasons why Android is killing Apple

Despite Apple’s best attempts to rejuvenate its stale software, and for all it’s glitz and glamour, I don’t believe that iOS 7 will change the current balance of power. My reasoning: because it fails to address key issues which separate Apple and Android.

I know some people will argue that Apple isn’t interested in the same markets as Android, and that it’s not the company’s goal to try and please everyone, which is fair enough. But my rebuttal is that the technology industry is brutal; it’s survival of the fittest, and those who don’t adapt will fall by the wayside.

So, in no particular order, here are my top five reasons for Android’s success over Apple:

1 – Hardware diversity

 

Android has a range of manufacturers producing a range of products. Without a central company dictating when new top of the line phones are released, Samsung, HTC, Sony, etc, are available to offer the very highest spec products as soon as new technologies become available, offering the best top of the line devices to consumers. We’ve seen over the course of just three months, faster and more powerful smartphones than ever before, whilst Apple is still stuck on last generation hardware technologies.

2 – Competition and innovation

 

But it’s not just a battle between Google and Apple, each manufacturer utilizing the Android operating system is in direct competition with everyone else, which had led to a much faster pace in innovation. There’s a distinct advantage in offering consumers something which they can’t get anywhere else — look at the recent top of the line Samsung and HTC products, the Galaxy S4 and the One, for example.

3 – Open source, free market system

 

You’ve probably noticed that a lot of Android’s strength stem from its open nature, which allows third parties to do what they want with the platform in order to offer consumers products which they would like to use. This has seen Android leap ahead of iOS in recent years, and has helped the platform capture larger and larger shares of the smartphone and tablet markets, but it’s also spun off a range of entirely new products.

4 – Strong developer community

 

This brings us neatly onto the next point, a strong and ever growing developer community.
We all know that there are a variety of custom ROMs for a start, each offering unique features, porting the default Android experience to handset which would otherwise go without, and some aiming to improve system performance. ROMs like CyanogenMod have proven hugely popular because of their punctual updates for handsets which otherwise would go without the latest versions of Android, and others like Paranoid Android are intent on innovating on the default Android experience.

5 – The Google ethos

Many of the reasons Android is doing so well listed above don’t really have anything to do with Google, but that isn’t to say that the company isn’t pulling its weight. Google has created a range of free applications which improve the users experience over the default operating system, and it’s constantly trying out new ideas and scrapping old ones which don’t work.